The Oakland police sex scandal is producing the firings and suspensions of nearly a dozen officers linked to a sexually exploited teenager. But the allegations and names are kept confidential, denying the public a chance to make sense of a devastating event.

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This anonymity comes courtesy of police leadership, both in the Bay Area and across the state. Its the reason that Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf can say next to nothing about the wave of departures. Instead of an open explanation and actual names, the details in this case are bottled up by an untenable state law. For more than a decade the personnel records of officers charged with serious transgressions remain sealed from public view even when the allegations are sustained.

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Its a lack of transparency at a time when law enforcement badly needs to connect with the public, not hide from it. A law signed by Gov. Jerry Brown in 1978 was later expanded by a state Supreme Court ruling in 2006 that keeps police personnel files dealing with misconduct cases out of sight.

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Elected representatives in California, so easily depicted as a liberal-voting blue state, are in fact overly deferential to police union leaders, who insist on this undue protection. Many other states have more open records, nothing close to the locked-up file cabinets that this state keeps.